By Peter Barry Chowka
For months now, I have been writing and speaking about the looming prospects for a Civil War 2.0 breaking out in the United States. The analysis probably seemed to many to be speculative and premature, pointing to something that might someday come to pass while in the meantime there was still hope that such a day would never actually arrive.
The new year, however, has made that hope harder to cling to as signs of violence are now breaking out into the open and can no longer be swept under the rug.
Another indication that the war has already started took place in the early morning hours of December 26 when officer Ronil Singh of the small town of Newman, California’s police department was shot dead allegedly by criminal illegal alien Gustavo Perez Arriaga. While on routine patrol, Singh had pulled over Arriaga’s vehicle because it had no rear license plate at which point Singh was executed, leaving a wife and five month-old son.
This is not the first time that a criminal illegal alien has murdered an innocent victim (all illegal aliens are de facto criminals because they broke laws by entering the country, but in this case the alleged perpetrator was also a gang member and had two DUIs on his record). In fact, such killings, in addition to assaults, rapes, robberies, home invasions, drug smuggling, and other violent crimes, are committed by illegal aliens multiple times on a daily basis all over the country. Another outrageous, high profile case that comes to mind is the July 1, 2015 fatal shooting of Kathryn (Kate) Steinle in San Francisco by illegal immigrant José Inez García Zárate, who admitted to shooting Steinle. On November 30, 2017, after five days of deliberations, the jury in Zarate’s criminal trial acquitted him of all murder and manslaughter charges.
Three and a half years after the Steinle murder, the assassination of Office Singh, himself a legal immigrant from Fiji and a respected California cop for over seven years, stands out as a stark new low point that illustrates one of the endemic problems in this country: To wit, the invasion of the United States by millions of un-educated, low IQ migrants from violent Third World countries, which has been ongoing for decades (to the extent that it is not even known how many of them are here now). The invasion has now reached critical mass, threatening the lives and safety of Americans everywhere around the country.
If the nation could unite politically to secure the border, enforce existing laws, and deport the tens of millions of illegal aliens who are already here, that would be one thing and a new “civil war” might not be inevitable. But that day and those possibilities are long gone. What remains and what has become the new normal is the violence, and the downplaying of it by Democrats and about half of the population, that is now targeting native-born Americans like Steinle and legal immigrants and new naturalized American citizens like Singh.
As Deroy Murdock wrote about the Singh murder in an article titled “A Tale of Two Immigrants” in National Review on January 5:
Arriaga, 33 [the alleged killer of Officer Singh], is not a model immigrant. He came to America from Mexico — illegally, crossing the border via Arizona. Yet the notion that the United States suffers a border-security crisis seems lost on Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York and House speaker Nancy Pelosi of California. They reportedly refused even to listen to Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen’s classified border-security briefing in the White House Situation Room on Wednesday. Instead, they repeatedly interrupted Nielsen as she tried to detail national-security threats on the southern front.
The Democrats, who support the concept of Sanctuary Cities and now Sanctuary States, and who embrace policies that coddle, encourage, and support illegals while they hamstring law enforcement and cripple border security, are clearly complicit in the mayhem being caused by the “migrants.”
Meanwhile, there are other indications that Civil War 2.0 is going hot. Calls from Democrats and the left encouraging violence and lawlessness have been increasing, especially since the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th president in November 2016. One of the more prominent examples among many was a rabble rousing speech to a mob of her supporters by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) last June in Los Angeles. On that occasion, Waters implored her audience to be on the lookout for prominent officials in the Trump administration so that:
If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.
Waters’s incendiary and provocative rant that appeared to border on inciting violence was followed on numerous occasions by Democrats and other hardcore leftists “pushing back” on Trump administration officials, getting in their faces and implicitly threatening them when they were out in public eating dinner or relaxing.
The growing far left base of the Democratic Party, which helped to fuel the Democrats’ takeover of the House of Representatives in the 2018 Midterm Elections, bodes ill for putting the genies of violence and toxic political division back in the bottle. After she was sworn in as a first term member of the new Congress on January 3, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), for example, the first “Palestinian-American” Congresswoman, referring to President Trump, told a crowd of cheering supporters “. . . we’re going to go in there and we’re going to impeach the motherf–ker.”
Two days later, on January 5, 2019, another fast rising new star of the 116th Congress, freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), an avowed socialist, entered into a Twitter war of words with Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), who was almost killed in an assassination attempt by a hardcore leftist in June 2017. Their debate concerned Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal to double the tax rate on the so-called 1% to 70%.
According to Fox News:
U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., abruptly halted a Twitter debate with newcomer Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York early Sunday morning [January 6] after at least three commenters made references to the June 2017 shooting in which Scalise and three other people were shot by a left-wing activist.
“snipe his ass,” one Twitter user wrote, in support of Ocasio-Cortez. . .
“she’s got better aim than James Hodgkinson, that’s for sure,” another wrote, comparing Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter responses to the marksmanship of the suspect in the Virginia shooting, a Bernie Sanders supporter who later died in a shootout with police.
As over 20,000 comments in response to the Fox News article piled up, one respondent on Sunday evening January 6 wrote: “When is the left going to address the hate in the Democrat party?” Not anytime soon, apparently, as the article noted that Ocasio-Cortez had not commented on Twitter about, or cautioned her supporters against making, the perceived references to or threats of violence aimed at Scalise.
Later Sunday evening, in her headline appearance on the top-rated news program in the country, CBS News’s 60 Minutes, Ocasio-Cortez continued to fan the flames of hatred and division when she told Anderson Cooper that “there’s ‘no question’ that President Trump is racist.”
Peter Barry Chowka writes about politics, media, popular culture, and health care for American Thinker and other publications. Follow him on Twitter at @pchowka.
